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College students sign up for donor database

PETER Symonds College students and staff, aged between 16 and 30, were invited by members of Southampton University’s Marrow Group to donate a saliva sample as part of the regional campaign to expand the charity’s donor base.

The students gave a few moments of their time during Health and Wellbeing Week to register their contact details “The 15 new members we signed up will be added to the national database along with the DNA results of their samples, once they have been processed,” said Lizzie Jones, president of Southampton Marrow.

“This information will then be cross-matched with those people, worldwide, who are currently waiting for a suitable match donor.”

Jack Plume added: “We are delighted with the response we had from the students at Peter Symonds, especially as many of them were amongst our main target audience, young males.

“The charity particularly need more young men to sign up as they produce more stem cells than women and are six times more likely to donate, however they make up just 11 per cent of our register.”

“Currently in the UK alone there are 1,800 patients waiting to hear of a match, so this new group of recruits are very valuable to us and any one of them could well be saving a life very soon.

“We also need more donors from black and minority ethnic backgrounds as we often struggle to find donor matches for people in these groups.”